Of course, Nina has no idea that Tiffany was here not long ago, stressed out over the exact same situation that has Nina feeling more high-strung than usual -- if for completely different reasons and from a completely different vantage point.
What she knows is that their fight had made her very tired, but not tired enough to eliminate the tight knot of anger and fear in her chest. She had at least been able to breathe around it by the end of the episode with Tiffany, to keep it cool; now it flares hot again, making her clench her fist tight as she raps on the door.
Most days she would easily take this place over Lefortovo, just as she'd told Lark she would. On rare, rare days like this one, though, she misses the bars looking like bars, and she misses the silence.
Je locks it, like he always does. And then he pauses and gathers a thought or two.
"I know you already knew we share the boat with murderers. And I know you know the value of posturing and blending. What I don't know is how upset you are with just me."
"That depends on what you really told him," Nina says; it's rare for her to just call out a bluff like that, but she's not about to let him treat her like an idiot. She's had enough of people blowing her off today.
"And why," she adds, because that's ostensibly supposed to be the reason she's here.
"I told him about revenge." And since he murdered Alfie for revenge and sat in zero for it he doubts it's any surprise that vengeance is in his history.
"I told you -- I don't care that you're talking to him, I care that you're feeding him. You think is really so much better, laughing and egging him on? You think that's not giving him what he wants just as much as fear?"
Which is, of course, where this all comes from, and her voice tightens sharply. "It's one thing to share a boat with murderers. It's another thing to share it with monsters. And maybe it's different for you, being able to fight back against them--" Because being a werewolf doesn't automatically lump him in with the monsters in her book; she'd promised Alec something like that, and it holds true. "But I can't. So I have to sit there and listen to my friends laugh about-- about brains and entrails and God knows what else when I'm doing my best, every day, not to end up being one of the people on the other side of that. Is that not supposed to bother me?"
She turns, her face flushed and heated, folding her arms tight across her chest as she paces away a bit -- putting some distance between them and getting out some of the anxious energy that's flooding her at the same time.
The funny thing is, Alec is no monster. But Lark is. And it has nothing to do with the wolf inside of him.
But Lark listens without interrupting or rushing to defend himself, without offering explanation until she's done.
"No. I can see why it does," he agrees quietly, and he can. "I remember being human. I remember being forced to rely on other people to keep the peace. To keep me from being shot or stabbed."
He takes a step back, too, and sits on the large white sofa behind him. There's room for her; and there's room on a chair across from him, too, if she gets tired of standing but doesn't want to be near him.
"The people you saw laughing and bragging are the people I'm watching. Knowing how and when and why a person turns violent is crucial." Lark is a werewolf, yes. But his kind are on the verge of extinction. He has to pay attention to who has their finger on a trigger, and this is just one of a hundred techniques he uses to keep himself alive.
She lets out a sharp, skeptical sound. "Watching Tiffany. And--" Well, okay, as fond as she is of him, Erskine is probably a legitimate target for suspicion. "And Tommy," she amends hastily.
She turns back to look at him, arms still folded tight around herself. "And you can watch without making it worse," she adds. "I heard everything you heard, minus whatever you told him, and I didn't say a thing until I heard you three chiming in."
"It isn't worse." Yet. He shakes his head slightly, slowly. "The only person I've seen who seems on the verge of real violence is Tristan. The rest are just scared. They're puffing themselves up, like roosters, so they'll feel less afraid. Tommy's still figuring Alfie out. Tiffany- that's how she does things. Alfie pays attention to her; she can't be afraid of him."
"It is worse," she snaps, but she quiets to let him talk, even if she does it with her jaw clenched tight. And, okay, fine -- that's all legitimate analysis, she can begrudgingly admit. She thinks he's overestimating both Tristan and Tiffany, but fine.
"You still didn't have to egg him on," she mutters stubbornly. "It wasn't funny. I don't know why everybody here expects everybody else to laugh these things off. Sinjir told me the same thing: that I was supposed to laugh when he talked about torturing me and... tell him to fuck off, or something like that. Like it was a total shock that it bothered me."
He considers that a moment. "...No. You're right. None of us should be telling you how to deal with him. But it is how a lot of other people choose to deal with it, and it does work for people like Sinjir."
But for the record, "It doesn't work for me. I'm not afraid of him because I've tortured and killed him and we reached an understanding. But I'm not laughing at his stories. Or at mine. And I do have them, Nina. I've done worse than he has and I don't feel bad about it--and you need to know that because I like you and I don't want you to feel like I'm lying to you about what I am."
She blinks, obviously surprised, going still and quiet like a startled deer. She had known about the murder, but not the torture... but then again, she hadn't asked. She hadn't thought to ask, but if there's a part of her that feels misled, there's a much bigger part that knows it's at least half her own fault. Even if she had thought to ask, she wouldn't have wanted to. He's her-- her ally, at least.
It's the same mechanism that lets her know he's a werewolf, know he's killed, and still not really think about that most of the time. At heart, it's the same mechanism that had let her fall just a little bit in love with Stan for real, amidst all the lies. Whatever dwells in her that had let her forget, for hours at a time, that he had put a gun to her friend's head and pulled the trigger for no good reason.
She can say she's always known Lark is dangerous, and she has. She does know that, very consciously; it's one of the reasons she wants him on her side. But there's a leap in her mind between knowing that and thinking of him as someone like Alfie Solomons. She swallows, touching her lips briefly, staring at him. Then she takes a deep breath and rubs her hand over the opposite arm, looking down as she lets it out slowly. "All right," she says quietly, a little defeated, but calm. Nothing has changed, after all, in the past minute or so. She still needs him as an ally.
And in a few minutes, he'll say something that will make her smile, and she can start to forget again.
He can see--and hear and smell--the shift of emotion in her. Part of him wants to back off and let them go back to smiling and laughing and ignoring the reality of things. But then she says 'All right' and in that tone. It hurts him in a way he can't define yet, it's too new, but he nods.
"I never forget who hurts my people, Nina. He hurt Tommy; that's not why I went after Alfie. But it didn't help his case, either. I always do everything I can to balance things when my friends are hurt. And I don't always tell them what I've done for them." There's a little weight on friends. Lark has many, many people he enjoys being with. Nina is one of perhaps four he would stand here and talk this way with.
If she needs him as an ally, she has him already. But it does come with Lark torturing people on her behalf, often in secret.
And so he gives her something else she can choose to be aware of or forget. She looks back up at him, her eyes dark, a little shiver running down her spine. For once she's not really trying to look small, but she does anyway, wrapped around herself like that, her shoulders hunched.
She's not stupid. She understands what he means. If she stays, it's with the tacit knowledge -- willfully suppressed or not -- that there might be a day in the future when someone gets tortured because of her. That if she stays now, she probably won't be able to stop it then. If she's really so horrified by Alfie and his talk, if she really cares that much about the morality of it, then she can leave his protection -- leave him, and maybe Alec too -- and know that she spared this hypothetical future person. That she's the sort of person who has mercy and empathy and what the Christians call grace inside of her.
But then she thinks about the people she actually knows here, and the fact that the sets of people she doesn't want to see on the other end of Lark's claws and the people that are likely to end up there because of her are almost two completely distinct circles. She thinks about Evi Sneijder, who had done much less to earn what might have been much more. She thinks about the fact that she stopped seeing any of those things in herself a long time ago.
So she goes to sit down next to him. "Why did you go after him?" she asks, still in the same quiet voice, maybe a little more detached now. "If it wasn't for Tommy?"
Lark still has his glass of water in hand, and he toys with it without drinking. "Because he and I got along. We had loose plans together, just to provide fun on the weeks or months between breaches. And then I was in the gym, about five feet from the battery they'd rigged. His bomb."
Lark shakes his head after a moment of silence and just sighs faintly. "I'm really tired of people turning on me. But that said, if I could go back, I wouldn't have done what I did to him."
He glances at her. "Because I think he really could have been helpful. And now we have to rebuild, and it takes time I don't know if I have. And because I normally never act just on anger, but I did with him. I don't like being someone who can't think past whatever he feels."
She takes this in with silence, adds to it something else she now knows about Lark: that when he does whatever he does to this hypothetical future person, it will have been planned. It will be in cold blood.
In her heart of hearts, it's still not a dealbreaker. In her head, it should be; she shouldn't be able to keep going along with this. But she stays, and reminds herself again that it will all fade to so much background noise soon enough.
"He didn't seem all that bothered by you speaking up," she notes. "And he said all the joking around -- this is how people get over things, to him. Maybe is easier to rebuild than you think it is."
"No, we get along alright now. But it's not like it was." Which bothers Lark but only a little. "It's harder when I did it mostly for myself."
He's killed before on the Barge, is the unspoken implication. And he has no regrets about that one.
"But what I want you to know is I don't find it funny. The things I've done have been for a reason--even if, in Alfie's case, I would have changed things if I could have. And if I seem to gloat, it's also for a reason."
She hears it and lets it go by; she can only deal with so much right now. She listens, instead, to what he says next, her eyes fixed on his face. She still looks small, curled in on herself, and now she looks young, too -- like a child listening to her teacher. Not for the first time, she thinks: He's so much better at this than I am.
Which is the other reason she's always been just a little bit afraid of him, and still is. She can't imagine what kind of long game he could be playing with her... but that doesn't mean he isn't playing one.
She doesn't say anything for a long moment. Eventually, she looks away, down at the couch, dropping her legs and fidgeting with her hands in her lap. "Maybe is like I said," she murmurs. "Different for you, if you can fight." But she doesn't mean it the way she did before. "I couldn't act that way even if I wanted to. I... have to be who I am." Little Nina. Poor Nina. Sad Nina, who has reasons for everything she does, too.
Lark is sharing a lot with her that he normally wouldn't. In some ways it's like a train building speed and he's not entirely sure when he'll be able to make it stop.
"I think it is different." He knows it is. He was a different person before he learned to kill--and before he learned to manipulate. A weaker person. And yet, "I like who you are. This way. I don't want you to have to change it. I know Alec has been teaching you to fight. There are other ways, too, ways he and I both know. And one way only I have."
She glances up briefly at him at that, but it's not like she needs to ask. "Even then," she says with a bit of a shrug, eyes dropping again. "Even when I know how to hit somebody, how to shoot a gun... Maybe down there, this would be enough, but up here? This is..."
Well, actually: "It's what's gotten me by so far," she notes. Six months in, and she hasn't been hurt by anyone, killed by anyone. That doesn't make her any less paranoid, but to her, it means that her approach has been working. She's not threatening enough to make anyone's radar, and she is vulnerable enough that the protectors have come out of the woodwork before the vultures could.
Even more than her pretty face, even more than her body, that vulnerability is the best weapon she has. She doesn't even mean to be using it on Lark right now, except as a general method of continuing to secure his sympathy -- but if she knew what was happening, it wouldn't surprise her much at all. People like to tell her things.
"Up here, with powers, you mean?" Lark studies her and then finally shrugs. "Even that can be changed. Some powers can be shared."
Nina is not the sort he normally even thinks about changing. She's too difficult to guide, and it would be giving her an awful lot of power. But it is still an option. It would still keep her quite safe.
Hypothetically, of course.
"And even if you don't have any of your own--well, you're right, you've found a good way of navigating everything safely."
She suspects she knows what he means by that, too, but she thinks instead of the powers she's already learning to share: the lessons with Quentin that no one else knows about. Someday, she thinks, the image of his little kitchen sitting warm in her chest. Someday, yes, even that can be changed. She stifles a brittle smile at the thought.
"You see, though? Even if I tried to do what they want me to, I can't. It wouldn't work -- wouldn't fit." Sweet, sad Nina can't be seen giggling at stories about boards with nails in them. Not that she especially wants to, because she still finds the whole thing foul, but now that she's talking about it, she realizes the constraint is there.
"I try to get along with everyone," she notes, and what she doesn't add is I try to be whatever they want me to be, "but I can only go so far."
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What she knows is that their fight had made her very tired, but not tired enough to eliminate the tight knot of anger and fear in her chest. She had at least been able to breathe around it by the end of the episode with Tiffany, to keep it cool; now it flares hot again, making her clench her fist tight as she raps on the door.
Most days she would easily take this place over Lefortovo, just as she'd told Lark she would. On rare, rare days like this one, though, she misses the bars looking like bars, and she misses the silence.
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He does hold the door open for her, though. "Are you okay?"
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She moves past him and into the room, but she stops a few feet from the door and turns back to look at him, waiting.
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"I know you already knew we share the boat with murderers. And I know you know the value of posturing and blending. What I don't know is how upset you are with just me."
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"And why," she adds, because that's ostensibly supposed to be the reason she's here.
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"Why does it bother you that I speak to him?"
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Which is, of course, where this all comes from, and her voice tightens sharply. "It's one thing to share a boat with murderers. It's another thing to share it with monsters. And maybe it's different for you, being able to fight back against them--" Because being a werewolf doesn't automatically lump him in with the monsters in her book; she'd promised Alec something like that, and it holds true. "But I can't. So I have to sit there and listen to my friends laugh about-- about brains and entrails and God knows what else when I'm doing my best, every day, not to end up being one of the people on the other side of that. Is that not supposed to bother me?"
She turns, her face flushed and heated, folding her arms tight across her chest as she paces away a bit -- putting some distance between them and getting out some of the anxious energy that's flooding her at the same time.
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But Lark listens without interrupting or rushing to defend himself, without offering explanation until she's done.
"No. I can see why it does," he agrees quietly, and he can. "I remember being human. I remember being forced to rely on other people to keep the peace. To keep me from being shot or stabbed."
He takes a step back, too, and sits on the large white sofa behind him. There's room for her; and there's room on a chair across from him, too, if she gets tired of standing but doesn't want to be near him.
"The people you saw laughing and bragging are the people I'm watching. Knowing how and when and why a person turns violent is crucial." Lark is a werewolf, yes. But his kind are on the verge of extinction. He has to pay attention to who has their finger on a trigger, and this is just one of a hundred techniques he uses to keep himself alive.
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She turns back to look at him, arms still folded tight around herself. "And you can watch without making it worse," she adds. "I heard everything you heard, minus whatever you told him, and I didn't say a thing until I heard you three chiming in."
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"You still didn't have to egg him on," she mutters stubbornly. "It wasn't funny. I don't know why everybody here expects everybody else to laugh these things off. Sinjir told me the same thing: that I was supposed to laugh when he talked about torturing me and... tell him to fuck off, or something like that. Like it was a total shock that it bothered me."
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But for the record, "It doesn't work for me. I'm not afraid of him because I've tortured and killed him and we reached an understanding. But I'm not laughing at his stories. Or at mine. And I do have them, Nina. I've done worse than he has and I don't feel bad about it--and you need to know that because I like you and I don't want you to feel like I'm lying to you about what I am."
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It's the same mechanism that lets her know he's a werewolf, know he's killed, and still not really think about that most of the time. At heart, it's the same mechanism that had let her fall just a little bit in love with Stan for real, amidst all the lies. Whatever dwells in her that had let her forget, for hours at a time, that he had put a gun to her friend's head and pulled the trigger for no good reason.
She can say she's always known Lark is dangerous, and she has. She does know that, very consciously; it's one of the reasons she wants him on her side. But there's a leap in her mind between knowing that and thinking of him as someone like Alfie Solomons. She swallows, touching her lips briefly, staring at him. Then she takes a deep breath and rubs her hand over the opposite arm, looking down as she lets it out slowly. "All right," she says quietly, a little defeated, but calm. Nothing has changed, after all, in the past minute or so. She still needs him as an ally.
And in a few minutes, he'll say something that will make her smile, and she can start to forget again.
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"I never forget who hurts my people, Nina. He hurt Tommy; that's not why I went after Alfie. But it didn't help his case, either. I always do everything I can to balance things when my friends are hurt. And I don't always tell them what I've done for them." There's a little weight on friends. Lark has many, many people he enjoys being with. Nina is one of perhaps four he would stand here and talk this way with.
If she needs him as an ally, she has him already. But it does come with Lark torturing people on her behalf, often in secret.
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She's not stupid. She understands what he means. If she stays, it's with the tacit knowledge -- willfully suppressed or not -- that there might be a day in the future when someone gets tortured because of her. That if she stays now, she probably won't be able to stop it then. If she's really so horrified by Alfie and his talk, if she really cares that much about the morality of it, then she can leave his protection -- leave him, and maybe Alec too -- and know that she spared this hypothetical future person. That she's the sort of person who has mercy and empathy and what the Christians call grace inside of her.
But then she thinks about the people she actually knows here, and the fact that the sets of people she doesn't want to see on the other end of Lark's claws and the people that are likely to end up there because of her are almost two completely distinct circles. She thinks about Evi Sneijder, who had done much less to earn what might have been much more. She thinks about the fact that she stopped seeing any of those things in herself a long time ago.
So she goes to sit down next to him. "Why did you go after him?" she asks, still in the same quiet voice, maybe a little more detached now. "If it wasn't for Tommy?"
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Lark shakes his head after a moment of silence and just sighs faintly. "I'm really tired of people turning on me. But that said, if I could go back, I wouldn't have done what I did to him."
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She toes her high heels off and draws her legs up onto the couch, hugging her knees loosely, her skirt just long enough to cover them.
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In her heart of hearts, it's still not a dealbreaker. In her head, it should be; she shouldn't be able to keep going along with this. But she stays, and reminds herself again that it will all fade to so much background noise soon enough.
"He didn't seem all that bothered by you speaking up," she notes. "And he said all the joking around -- this is how people get over things, to him. Maybe is easier to rebuild than you think it is."
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He's killed before on the Barge, is the unspoken implication. And he has no regrets about that one.
"But what I want you to know is I don't find it funny. The things I've done have been for a reason--even if, in Alfie's case, I would have changed things if I could have. And if I seem to gloat, it's also for a reason."
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Which is the other reason she's always been just a little bit afraid of him, and still is. She can't imagine what kind of long game he could be playing with her... but that doesn't mean he isn't playing one.
She doesn't say anything for a long moment. Eventually, she looks away, down at the couch, dropping her legs and fidgeting with her hands in her lap. "Maybe is like I said," she murmurs. "Different for you, if you can fight." But she doesn't mean it the way she did before. "I couldn't act that way even if I wanted to. I... have to be who I am." Little Nina. Poor Nina. Sad Nina, who has reasons for everything she does, too.
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"I think it is different." He knows it is. He was a different person before he learned to kill--and before he learned to manipulate. A weaker person. And yet, "I like who you are. This way. I don't want you to have to change it. I know Alec has been teaching you to fight. There are other ways, too, ways he and I both know. And one way only I have."
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Well, actually: "It's what's gotten me by so far," she notes. Six months in, and she hasn't been hurt by anyone, killed by anyone. That doesn't make her any less paranoid, but to her, it means that her approach has been working. She's not threatening enough to make anyone's radar, and she is vulnerable enough that the protectors have come out of the woodwork before the vultures could.
Even more than her pretty face, even more than her body, that vulnerability is the best weapon she has. She doesn't even mean to be using it on Lark right now, except as a general method of continuing to secure his sympathy -- but if she knew what was happening, it wouldn't surprise her much at all. People like to tell her things.
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Nina is not the sort he normally even thinks about changing. She's too difficult to guide, and it would be giving her an awful lot of power. But it is still an option. It would still keep her quite safe.
Hypothetically, of course.
"And even if you don't have any of your own--well, you're right, you've found a good way of navigating everything safely."
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"You see, though? Even if I tried to do what they want me to, I can't. It wouldn't work -- wouldn't fit." Sweet, sad Nina can't be seen giggling at stories about boards with nails in them. Not that she especially wants to, because she still finds the whole thing foul, but now that she's talking about it, she realizes the constraint is there.
"I try to get along with everyone," she notes, and what she doesn't add is I try to be whatever they want me to be, "but I can only go so far."
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